Culture in the Coalfields
Review: 'The Valleys' at The National Museum, Cardiff. ★★★★☆
In the year 1188, a cleric known as Gerald, born in Pembrokeshire and descended from the Lords of Barry, was making a long journey through his homeland of Wales. Gerald was secretary to the Archbishop of Canterbury and was assisting him in preaching the first crusade through the wild western lands of Britain. After crossing the border near Hay-on-Wye, they travelled down the valley of the Usk, through Cardiff, along the South Coast to St Davids. From there they continued round Cardigan Bay and into the mountains of the north, before skirting the north coast to complete their circuit. We know all this because Gerald documented the whole journey in a kind of travelogue, which incredibly survives intact.
As well as detailed descriptions of places, landscapes, their history, and folklore, Gerald takes great care to elucidate the kind of people they encountered, they are some of the earliest descriptions of people we can still recognise today as being Welsh. Amongst the qualities he notes in his fellow countrymen are ‘boldness, agility, and courage’ as well as ‘frugality and parsimony’ but equally their propensity to quarrel and their unreliability. Whilst these could apply to any people, there are distinctive features of the Welsh he notes with pride; their skilfulness with music instruments and their ‘florid rhetoric and originality when speaking in public’ as well as their ‘witticisms and word-play’. Most touchingly he writes of the choral singing;
“When they come together to make music, the Welsh sing their traditional songs, not in union, as is done elsewhere, but in parts, in many modes and modulations. When a choir gathers to sing, which happens often in this country, you will hear as many different parts and voices as there are performers, all joining together in the end to produce a single organic harmony.”
Reading Gerald’s account, it would seem the Welsh have not changed much in the subsequent 900 years. His insights could apply to the Methodist chapel preachers of the nineteenth-century, the striking miners of the 1980s, the post-war politicians who established the welfare state, or the many excellent community choirs, opera companies, and orchestras across Wales today. Many of these facets of the Welsh personality have remained strongest in the steep-sided valleys north of Swansea, Cardiff, and Newport, the trenches cut through the landscape over millennia by the rivers Tawe, Taff, Rondda, Cynon, Usk and others. In Gerald’s time they were sparsely populated wild uplands, but in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century they became the forge of the world. Coal and iron, fire and steam, conspired to transform those valleys into the overpopulated, over-exploited, and underrepresented crucibles of the industrial revolution. In the mid-19thC, more than one third of the world’s entire coal supply passed through the valleys to Cardiff docks.
Today, the valleys still live with the legacy of that period. The industry might have gone, the slag tips greened over, but the signs are still there. Still the most densely populated area of Wales, row after row of terraced workers cottages now house one of the most deprived populations in Europe. On the streets of Abercynon or Ystradgunlais, Thatcher has never been forgiven. Coal and iron moved out, and the vacuum was never filled. Yet still, resolutely, these colourful and often lively communities cling to the hillsides. This is the subject of the National Museum Cardiff’s latest free exhibition: The Valleys. An encyclopaedic attempt to display the last two-centuries of visual culture created in, about, and by the South Wales valleys and their people.
The exhibition cannot entirely avoid the cliches and stereotypes, miners with blackened faces but hearts of gold, male voice choirs in red blazers belting Cwm Rhondda in a rock-like chapel clinging to the hill between the low-slung terraces. But there is not a hint of Max Boyce about this exhibition which takes a sympathetic anthropological tone to its exploration, letting the images lead. The show works for locals, who know the valleys personally, but would also function as a fantastic introduction to the history and atmosphere of those communities for an outsider, a tourist, a visitor to Wales.
Outsider and insider, they are part of the story the exhibition tells. Despite the idiosyncrasies of the Welsh, and there are few of us more idiosyncratic than the people of the valleys, we are ultimately a welcoming people, and the exhibition features many outsiders who were adopted by the valleys. The German Heinz Koppel who fled the Nazis, losing his mother to the holocaust in the process, taught art to children and adults in Dowlais, whilst the war raged in the continent. The community amateur art group, whose work is displayed alongside Koppel’s colourful and graphic, Merthyr Blues, 1955, is part of his lasting legacy in the community.
A few valleys west, and the Polish refugee Josef Herman, affectionately known as Joe Bach (Little Joe), was making a home for himself in Ystradgynlais. Herman came to the community with the idea of painting the miners, the men on whose back the war effort had been built and the inheritors of those pioneers of the industrial revolution. He almost immediately fell in love with the place and its people, saying, "I stayed here because I found ALL I required. I arrived a stranger for a fortnight. The fortnight became eleven years." His monumental miners are dark, hard, and rocky, seemingly hewn from the same rock and coal they worked. Despite this brooding hulkiness, they are nonetheless deeply human, often depicted at rest in-between backbreaking shifts, they sit and slouch in architectonic poses. There are several of Herman’s works in the show, arranged amongst many other images of miners across a high wall in the room dedicated to those heroic labourers who called the valleys home. Disappointingly, Herman's greatest miner painting is absent, the enormous panoramic view of six miners at rest, painted for the ‘Materials of the Island’ pavilion at the 1951 Festival of Britain. Spread across six panels and painted in the rich browns, blacks, and ochres that were the pallet of the industrial valleys, the work has remained at the Glynn Vivian Museum in Swansea, but would have been a highlight of this still excellent show.
Outsiders Koppel and Herman might have been, but their art shows how deeply their integration ran, a seam of inspiration which ran both ways. Local artists feature too, some of the most interesting being the earliest in the show. Penry Williams is a name that few recognise, even in Wales, his works are seldom on display in the main collection. However, here, alongside Cornish artist John Petherick, he offers a fascinating window onto the early years of industrialisation, when the valleys were simultaneously being explored for their natural beauty and exploited for their natural resources. In the smallest but most intriguing room of the exhibition, the picturesque and the sublime are to be found in both the waterfalls, caves, and castle ruins, as well as the nocturnally illuminated forges and ironworks colonising the region. Scarcely credible watercolours of an orange glow emanating like searchlights from the architectural amalgamations that made up the early industrial landscape, are placed side-by-side with the same artists using the same techniques to depict gorgeous waterfalls, all too soon running black with spoil. We might see it as naivety, but in those eventful decades at dawn of the nineteenth century, to feel the same wonder at both the beauty of nature and the beauty of industry was not the paradox we feel today. Enjoyably, included at the centre of this room, is Paul Seawright’s contemporary photograph of a valley illuminated by the same otherworldly orange glow as the ironworks in the watercolours, but this time from a long exposure image of the modern street lighting in the post-industrial town below.
The radical politics of the valleys runs under the surface of this exhibition. The texts and curation don’t force it down your throat, but you cannot help implicitly receive it from the works on display. In 1831, the people of Merthyr Tydfil, then the largest town in Wales, rose up against the oppressive rule of the iron barons who were cutting pay and creating dangerous conditions both in the workplaces and the cheap, cramped housing they constructed. It is believed that these riots were the first occasion on which a red flag was used in the UK as a symbol of worker’s rebellion. For more than a week, 10,000 workers controlled the town, seeing off repeated military assaults. Eventually the town was recaptured, 24 protesters killed by the army in the process, and the now infamous Dic Penderyn was hanged at Cardiff for his role in the rising. Penry Williams’ little toy-town-like painting of the streets of Merthyr Tydfil during the eponymous rising is ostensibly included to give a flavour of the swiftly expanding townscape, but there is something haunting about the miniature, sketchy figures in the browns and greys haphazardly fleeing the orderly columns of red-coated soldiers who patrol the streets. In the foreground, little groups of people watch on as if the bloody reprisals are a fox hunt or a game of cricket. Their matchstick bodies are redolent of a more politically engaged LS Lowry (who is also featured in the show, looking rather insipid in comparison).
In the following room, a collection of 16 small panels, each with a single male figure are displayed in a grid. They are naive and amateurish, rough around the edges and almost cartoonish in their unreality, which makes them all the more vivid a record of workers from the Welsh valleys. Painted by the local jobbing artist William Jones Chapman around 1840, each painting is an individual portrait of a worker with, crucially, their name and profession attached, regardless of class, station, or seniority. John Davies, Tin Mills Manager, Hirwaun. William James, Roller, Treforest. John Bryant, Mine Agent, Hirwaun. Doll-like they may be, but each is dressed in the work clothes of their particular profession, with the tools of their trade. There are the poorest of poor quarrymen, to the middle managers, the foremen, and everything in between. Stone, coal, iron, railways, canals, all the different industries of the valleys are represented, not by their owners or investors, not by dramatic scenes of forges and furnaces, but instead by the people who keep the wheels turning, and the name of each has been given to posterity by Chapman’s funny little paintings.
The more modern left-wing heritage of the region is nicely encapsulated by David Garner’s new work, commissioned for the exhibition. Printed in bold text across a wall is a paragraph thick with illusionary language, heavy with metaphor, and entirely detached from meaning. A loudspeaker nearby reads out the text in a sonorous and heavily accented male voice which evokes the fiery nonconformist preaching of the Welsh chapel, but also the impassioned political speech of mid-20th century Labour politicians who grew from that tradition. Especially that of NHS founder Aneurin Bevan who appears on large banners nearby. The text, although ultimately meaningless, evokes these traditions of almost poetic public speech, noted by Gerald of Wales in 1188, and revived by poets, priests, and politicians over the centuries. One gets wrapped up in the rising flow of the text, inspired with a drive to…well…what exactly? It's an experiment in sound, with the abstract quality of music, but look and listen carefully enough and you’ll find anagrams of the phrase ‘Universal Basic Income’ scattered throughout.
The proud history of collectivist design gets a spotlight too, with a fine corner showing examples of Brynmawr furniture and Rhondda-wear ceramics. Both the creation of the Quakers, one of the many nonconformist sects that flourished in the valleys, these were studios and workshops embedded in the communities. The Brynmawr Experiment, as it became known, was an initiative to alleviate unemployment caused by the Great Depression, training men and boys as cabinet makers and producing clean, simple, functional, and therefore ultimately modernist furniture, for sale across the UK. Led by the designer Paul Matt, Brynmawr Furniture saw a period of great success between 1929 and 1940, with sales in major department stores in Cardiff, Birmingham, and Manchester, as well as a showroom in the heart of fashionable Chelsea. Despite the project ending with the outbreak of war, the timeless Quaker simplicity and modern, almost art deco lines have kept the furniture popular and highly collectable. Such projects, combining modern aesthetics with functional socialist practice, sit truly at the heart of the modernists movement across Europe and their inclusion in this show is useful in dispelling the myth that the valleys are somehow backward or lost to their industrial heritage.
As industry began to decline in the second-half of the twentieth century, artists began to change too. The gritty realism which has preoccupied many images of the valleys was replaced by surreal, abstract, and Pop inflected artworks. The increasingly zombie-like communities, limping on despite their raison d’etre now in terminal decline or gone forever, were a focus for George Poole. His dark terraced streets, interspersed with chapels, all in the shadow of the high mountainous valley sides are inhabited by pale-faced ghosts of policemen, miners, children, and housewives. Whilst Ernest Zobole and others turned to more abstract renditions of the valleys and their way of life. Zobole was a native of Rhondda, and whilst many of his works are sketchy and colourful abstractions, he is represented in this show by a number of his more metaphysical paintings, quiet street scenes or interiors of valleys homes. The fruit on the dining table, with light reflecting off the plain white wall behind. There is an awful silence in a work like this, devoid of people, where there was once the noise of industry and life, an absence lingers in the heart of such paintings.
In the centre of this room stands a stylish, streamlined, and vaguely American looking product, some kind of dishwasher affair, all chrome, rounded corners, and vinyl panels. It's a creation of the Hoover company, who until quite recently had a factory in Abercanaid, where a number of my relatives worked at one time or another. Hoover were part of the new wave of industries which began to fill the vacuum left by coal and iron, but they too are, in turn, leaving the valleys now. There was pride in the products of the Hoover company in Abercanaid, as there had been pride in the mine and foundries before. The design and invention may have been happening elsewhere but they were put together by Welsh hands, and the hands of valleys people no-less, the very same which had built the industrial revolution and waved the red flag in ‘31.
The final room of the show is a photographic retrospective of the last century. Some of the earliest experiments in the medium were conducted in the region, and it has long been a mecca for photographers, both outsider and insiders. Although the very act of looking through a lens, and in turn looking at these moments of real life captured and framed, makes one feel like a perpetual outsider through their inherent voyeurism, no matter how invited. The photographers in this room, some more artistic than others, include Robert Frank, Helen Muspratt, and Bruce Davidson, the latter of which is the pick of the bunch. Davidson is an American, who had been an army photographer in the war, before working for major US magazines, including Life. He was sent to the coalfields to photograph the people and their communities by Holiday magazine in 1965, but the film he returned with was not exactly documentary. Davidson’s images explore the fundamental juxtapositions of life in the valleys which, whilst taken utterly for granted by those who live there, can seem surreal to outsiders. The entirely man-made landscape of terraced houses, pit heads, chapels and graveyards, contrasted by the wild windswept mountains which loom above. There is a frontier quality about the people in his photographs, hints of a heavily industrialised wild west. The hard, coal-covered faces of the miners, the almost luna landscape around the mines, the children, soft and innocent, who are growing up against this backdrop. In a deeply strange yet touching image, a young boy with bowl-cut and round spectacles pushes a box trolley up a steep road behind terraced houses, in it, like a pram, sits a battered teddy in dungarees and a dead-eyed dolly. Behind him, in the valley below, enormous warehouses, factories, and smokestacks dominate, whilst white laundry flutters in the smoke on a nearby line.
Of all the photographs in the room, it is another of Davidson’s which draws my attention. Dark workers’ cottages fringe an overgrown graveyard, a pool of light highlights the nearest headstone, topped with relief carving of wild flowers, and just below stands a very young girl in a dress, leaning with one hand on the stone, she looks up to the sky with closed eyes and open mouth - crying out, yawning, sighing? The darkness and light, the youth and age, the natural and the industrial, an intoxicating concoction of juxtapositions, and a scene that could be nowhere other than the valleys. The layers of human time, two centuries of tightly-packed habitation dropping their spoil on top of the last, like the slag-tips which loom above. A decade after this photo of the girl and grave was taken, one of those mountainous tips would tragically bury the school and homes of Aberfan. The disaster goes unmentioned in the exhibition, but the spectre hangs low over the photographs in this room, their often press-like quality evoking those terrible images ingrained in the minds of all Welsh people.
The majority of the photography on show is in black & white, which feels the most appropriate somehow. The more modern colour images have an uncanny quality of voyeurism, making us all outsiders to these scenes of quotidian valley life. They feel a little close to home, without any artistic or historical distance, they’re images you could see for yourself if you just drove half-an-hour north of the Museum. The exhibition stumbles a little when faced with these contemporary images, struggling to account for what the valleys are like now, with all of the industry gone, and the region amongst the poorest in Europe. Despite still holding a third of the Welsh population, people are moving out of the area faster than they’re moving in. Much has been done in the last few decades to try and stem the flow of terminal decline, but the loss of EU funding after Brexit has hit the valleys hard.
However, overall, it pleases me to say this is a very good exhibition and a good example of what the National Museum can and should be for. I have not disguised my disappointment and frustration with the art offering of the museum in the past, and there remain fundamental issues with how the collection is managed, which will be further exacerbated by the Welsh Government's draconian cuts. But a show like this, almost entirely made up of works from the museum’s rich permanent collection, but not those that are regularly on display, based in local interest but with an eye to an international context, available for free and helping people reconnect with a sense of cultural identity, is very welcome indeed. A show like this can remind people that art is not something remote from everyday life, that it can and will flourish wherever it can root, even in the valleys. The curation makes it clear that these works are a result of the history of the valleys that made them, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
In the 2021 census, the valleys were revealed to be the area where the strongest Welsh identity is felt. Despite being overwhelmingly English-speaking, 70% of people in Merthyr identified as Welsh above everything else. Amongst other Welsh people, those of us outside of the valleys, they have always been seen as their own little country, tightly knit, idiosyncratic, and all too often the butt of jokes. It takes some hybrid sense of insider and outsider to truly get the fullest picture of a community and its culture, and this exhibition gets close. When Gerald made his journey around Wales in 1188, he came as both insider and outsider, Welsh born and raised, he was also deeply embedded in the English culture and the trans-continental culture of the Church. Welsh, English, Norman-French, and Latin mingled in his head. Maybe that's why he saw us with such clarity. Much as his text illuminates the long history of Welsh identity, this exhibition shows what that spirit can produce and inspire from outsiders and insiders alike, even, perhaps especially, when in extremis.
★★★★☆
The Valleys is on at the National Museum Cardiff until 3rd November 2024, it is free entry and does not require booking.
fantastic!
Thanks Morgan -as an ‘immigrant’ I learnt a lot as well as ending the art in its own right.